What Is This?

The Diary of a Young Boat is a kind of interdimensional radio play—sometimes with and sometimes without any actual radios involved. The shape-shifting forms this ongoing series takes reflect its embedded narrative: the fictional aural diary of a pubescent girl who miraculously transforms into a boat.

The installations in this series create a portrait of a self that isn’t defined by a solid mass or bounded by a contour. Instead, what emerges is a representation of the precariously balanced system of perception, memory and imagination that keeps a human being afloat. (See below for links to previous installations and/or performances.)

Most recently, “Metamorphosis”—a suspended painting/sculpture from The Diary—was installed in Ionian Academy, Corfu, Greece, supported by a grant from the US embassy and the Ionian University. In May 2018, Ms. Hoch was awarded the Ionian University seal for her achievements in the field of interdisciplinary art.

Several new installations and performances of The Diary of a Young Boat are planned for 2018/19, including the permanent installation of suspended painting/sculptures in the Women’s Prison in Giudecca, Venice, Italy, Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, accompanied by a performance of The Diary by the inmates and a publication of the text. For more information about this project, click here.

The Women’s Prison in Giudecca in Venice, Italy (photo, above right), is internationally renowned for its dedication to providing a safe place for the rehabilitation and recovery of its inmates. The effectiveness of its focus on regeneration and growth rather than on punishment has garnered worldwide attention. Special programs enable inmates to acquire skills and training that prepare them for work after their release, as well as involve them in a positive way with their immediate environment, such as the prison’s organic garden Orto delle Meraviglie (Garden of Marvels); their atelier for artisanal tailoring including costumes for the Teatro La Fenice, the renowned Venetian opera house; and special projects in visual, theater, and literary arts.

What was the impetus for the Diary of a Young Boat?

At a dinner party long ago, I heard a curious fact: that the majority of documented incidents of poltergeist—or inexplicable occurrences of psychokinesis—occur in the homes of pubescent girls. After researching this, what intrigued me about these reports wasn’t their occult or sensational aspects, but the fact that such a naked challenge to our fundamental assumptions about physical reality and “laws of physics” comes from the unconscious of pubescent girls.

These stories seemed to me perfect allegories for the extraordinary, unsung power of raw female energy, and led me to this project. The heart of “Diary of a Young Boat” is the fictional, aural diary of a 13-year-old girl, who becomes the locus of bizarre occurrences, culminating in her miraculous transformation into a boat. This transformation, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Kafka’s cockroach, isn’t meant to be a science-fiction story, but a metaphor for our deepest yearnings and latent powers. The diary reflects the jumbled chaos of adolescence: alarming bodily changes are interwoven with irreverent descriptions of classrooms, abusive authorities, and the girl’s personal passion for science and the supernatural. Family, teachers, and doctors attribute her bizarre physical mutations to a psychological illness; but really it’s her own brilliant mechanism for self-preservation and escape from the prison of her childhood. “I have a genius for getting sick,” she says, It’s my talent. My gift.”

In the unbridled energy of puberty, indomitable unconscious desires are unleashed: defying consensus reality and the circumscribed limits of the imagination, the young girl transforms into a boat and vanishes, leaving behind the record of her metamorphosis.

What forms has the Diary of a Young Boat taken so far?

Mirroring the young girl’s shape-shifting metamorphosis, this ongoing project takes on a variety of forms. These are some of the forms the Diary of aYoung Boat has already taken:

The written text was completed in 2008 and adapted into a radio play in 2009; subsequent installations and stand-alone sculpture/paintings and drawings are documented in the Young Boat Archive

Diario di una giovane barca in tre movimenti (June – July 2013)—three live performances of excerpts of the Diary of a Young Boat, performed by Laura Falqui in Italian, in three site-specific installations on three floors of Cartoleria 18 Società Cooperativa in Bologna, Italy

Excerpts (in Italian) of the Diary of a Young Boat (Diario di una giovane barca) were read by actress Laura Falqui from Bologna’s Radio Città del Capo and broadcast live in a special presentation at Casa dei Pensieri Libreria for the national Festa dell’Unità, in Parco Nord, Bologna, Italy, on September 8, 2013

What upcoming installations and performances are planned for Diary of a Young Boat?

Three permanent installations in the Women’s Prison in Giudecca (Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca) in Venice, Italy, accompanied by a performance of The Diary by the inmates, and publication of the text

An installation at Ionian University, Corfu, Greece, in Spring 2018

What new forms are projected for Diary of a Young Boat?

Digitally programmed reel-to-reel tape players embedded in sequential immersive installations in urban sites, specifically adapted to each city, allowing the audience to experience The Diary of a Young Boat in its entirety, in real time and real space

Urban interventions are in development for various cities in Europe and the US

Online Web streaming of the entire audio play, accompanied by a non-illustrative “visual score”—that is, neither the audio nor the visual elements will illustrate each other, but rather both will exist as complementary, parallel narratives